Hand-portable GC-TMS Instrumentation for Rapid Detection and Differentiation of Airborne Biological Threats

Rapid detection and identification of biological threats in air during field operations and in gaseus flow streams from swatch permeation test fixtures are critical to protect the warfighter, first responders and civilians from exposure to infectious biological agents. The focus of this proposal is to develop these capabilities based on a proprietary hand-portable gas chromatograph-toroidal ion trap mass spectrometer (GC-TMS) instrument that has been developed by Torion Technologies for chemical threat detection. The proposed technology will be capable of sampling and concentrating bacterial endospores from gaseous media such as air, converting the particles into unique chemical biomarkers that can be analyzed by the GC-TMS system, and determining the presence of any target endospores using sophisticated deconvolution and spectral matching algorithms that can isolate relevant GC profiles and MS fingerprints from irrelevant background biological and chemical interferences to construct reliable bacterial endospore signatures. Specifically, in this Phase I project, we will demonstrate the collection of bacterial endospores using a small, battery-operated two-stage particle impactor, generate reproducible chemical biomarker signatures from captured bacterial endospores using acid-catalyzed hydrolysis/methylation, and apply a new classification and discrimination algorithm that is robust to growth conditions for identifying bacterial endospores.